Month: May 2016

As the trimester comes to an end, it’s a good time for reflecting on how I feel I went and how I can improve.

Overall I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, but I also had no idea how full on this trimester would be. Turns out learning C++ is still hard if you’re good at C# and group projects don’t always go well. Who would have guessed?

In regards to Scripting for Game Developers, I think I did okay academically. At this point in time I don’t have my results for the survival shooter, and I’m pretty sure I was only a few marks off a distinction for “Angry Cars” which is a little disappointing, but still good. I also now have my own personal library of mechanics from various genres of games which I can now use in future projects and build on, which I am very happy about. I also got to help a few of my designer friends with their projects which I enjoyed doing, as it helps me think about how I would do certain mechanics and helps me remember mechanics Ive done in the past, and I always enjoy helping friends.

Naturally, I still have plenty of room for improvement, which is good. I would hate to think I have already hit the peak of my programming ability without even reaching the half way point of my uni course. It would seem my time management is still an issue, potentially because I came into this trimester a little over confident and in the future I should allow myself some slack time so that if I run into any problems I don’t start getting pressured by a lack of time.

I would like to end this trimester by thanking my amazing lectures for another great trimester at SAE.

This week was purely just working on the assessment that was due, the previously mention survival shooter. I ended up running out of time and didn’t get to implement a bunch of features I wanted to put in, but overall I am pretty happy with how everything turned out.

One thing I didn’t get to do is have an upgrade increase after each purchase, which is something I felt was pretty important to my game, because as there are more enemies per round the player will earn more points and increasing the cost would have kind of balanced that out. I also never got around to having the enemies health naturally increase in relation to the round level.

I did get my spawning mechanic to work exactly how I imagined it, which I am really happy about. I ended up creating a co-routine that is called on the start of the game. First it generates two random numbers, one between 1 and 100 (for enemies) and one between 1 and 4 (for spawn). If the first number was less than 51, a “Zombear” (the basic enemy) would spawn at the spawn point that corresponds to the other random value, if it was between 51 and 74 a “Zombunny” would spawn (moves faster) and if it was 75 or higher a “Hellephant” would spawn (More health, moves slower).

I would have to say that in the future I need to balance my subjects better. I spent far too much time trying to catch my production group up and I ended up falling behind in my other subjects. I guess in the end it all comes down to time management, because if I started catch up on production when it was less of a problem, I would have had more time for my other subjects.

This week in class, while working on the real time strategy game, the mechanic we were implementing was the ability to allow the player the option to place a building somewhere on that map by pressing a button and selecting the location.

As mentioned, by clicking a button the player would bring up a “ghost-like” square that would follow around the player indicating the location the building will be placed in. If the building can be placed in the current location, the square will be green and if it cant it will be red. On placement a basic animation will play that makes it look like a cube is rising from the ground, representing the building being built. We also implemented a second building which was thinner, but longer and before the lesson ended I managed to implement a third button that hid the first two until it was pressed, representing a build menu that would show all the potential buildings that can be built.

In regards to the assessment, I have made progress with player and camera movement. Both are working as intended and I gave the camera a very small amount of lag, so instead of directly following the player, if the player moves it will wait a fraction of a second before moving. The effect is barely noticeable but it makes moving back and fourth a lot less jarring.

As I’m sure I thoroughly enjoy figuring out how to turn an idea for a game into a functioning mechanic, I imagine it would be even more fun without a lingering due date, but I guess unless I work for myself I’m always going to have a time frame I have to work with but even then, if I don’t set myself a time limit I run the risk of never completing a project.

This week we were given our final game assessment for this module, which is any sort of game that has some kind of resource management. I opted for creating another survival shooter and creating a scoring system where the points can be spent to buy upgrades for the character.

Obviously, the first step in creating a survival shooter with an economy system is to create a survival shooter. The player movement will be basic wasd movement with a following top down camera. The next step will be to create a single enemy type that will constantly follow the player around trying to catch them. By the end there will be more than one enemy type and they will have more health and different move speeds. After that the player and enemy will need to have their basic interactions such as dealing damage to each other and the player will have to gain points which they can spend. The hardest part will most likely be my spawn mechanic.

Currently, I am planning to have four seperate spawn points and three enemy types and the way I want my spawning to work is that a certain amount of enemies will spawn each round, with the amount increasing each round and both the enemy position and type of enemy being randomly decided.

Natrually there will also be relevant UI elements such as an ammo count, amount of points the player has and some kind of end game menu.

Along with this, in class we are creating a real time strategy game that has the ability to let the player click and drag to select things as well as build different kinds of buildings.